Making sense of CRM – Customer Relationship Management in 2010
Leads, Prospects, Customers, Email Campaigns, Phone, Social, and Mobile Communication…
A good CRM nowadays should organize all this in a nice clean, web based interface across department, national, and international lines.
From my limited experience it appears that as far as CRM or Customer Resource Management goes, SalesForce is the 900 pound gorilla in Small/Mid size business market and probably Oracle or a Microsoft product is the standard on the enterprise level. This is clearly not written by a professional in the field, but let’s see if we can make some sense of all this CRM stuff..
I’m sorting out my best options for a company that I’m putting together.. Citywide.TV so please feel free to post comments with anything that you think would add to the discussion!!
Here’s what I know so far:
Salesforce.com is widely used, clean, robust, pricey (min. $60/month) and plugins are available for almost anything if not there are plenty of Geeks more than happy to click you together whatever you can dream up. Here’s a video from their YouTube channel that helps to clarify the web-based or Cloud Computing platform:
Sugar is an open-source platform that is free for the code and around 30 clams a month to get hosted and rigged up with some e-mail mechanics.
Esalestrack is a simple, out of the box solution that runs $40/month per user:
That’s it for now, I’m still learning about all this CRM stuff. Again I’d love for ya’ll to comment with any other good solutions you know about and/or add to the vague descriptions of these platforms I’ve written 
Customer Relations Management is extremely important to success of any business in 2010 so let’s try to sort out our best options here!!
